


heart-strings undone

by kimaracretak, spacewitchescantdie



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Bad Ending, Body Horror, Eldritch Abomination Rey, F/F, Female Kylo Ren, Hanahaki Disease, The Dark Side of the Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-10-27 03:36:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20753696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak, https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacewitchescantdie/pseuds/spacewitchescantdie
Summary: A stem gets caught on Kylo's tongue before she can answer and she chokes, tries to swallow it down. The roots are around her lungs, somewhere so deep she can't even use the Force to dislodge them. It isn't worth trying, anyway: it hasn't worked in years.





	heart-strings undone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lypiphaera](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lypiphaera/gifts).

> The dappled dying  
Flowering cold grey tombs  
With crumbling walls, I feel  
Our truth is laid bare  
— Ne Obliviscaris, 'And Plague Flowers the Kalaidoscope'
> 
> You… you are the darkness in which all life dies, milord. All life… exists to feed your power, and my life… my life is yours.  
— Visas Marr

The last princess of Alderaan sits alone among the last floating remnants of her home. In sorrow and in sleep she resembles her mother, though the time has long passed when anyone would dare to say so in her presence.

The flowers spilling down her chest, though - Leia Organa had never borne that particular burden. Leia Organa, darling of the galaxy, was loved even when she had rather wished to be left alone. The woman who hardly remembered what it was like to want to be called Breha had brought the flowers upon herself as surely as she had given herself the name Kylo Ren.

"Plom blooms," Rey's voice says from somewhere in the shadows. "Red and dull. Are you getting worse?"

Kylo coughs, and doesn't bother turning her head. Rey hasn't shown her face in - she's lost count of how many cycles. She thinks, sometimes, it's better that way, when she can remember how Rey looked before the dark started clawing its way up from underneath her skin. "You know I am."

But then again, the memory of Rey and the time Before is fading as quickly as her breath is, these days. The knots of orchids unfurling in her throat are as hard to dislodge as the guilt she knows Rey doesn't feel anymore.

"You miss me," Rey says, and Kylo imagines she can hear her smile. Does Rey even have a mouth anymore?

"Always," Kylo says. A blueblossom tumbles from her lips, and she lets herself imagine what it would look like tucked behind Rey's ear.

Rey is quiet for so long Kylo wonders if she's left. "But you made me," she says, and she sounds so plaintive, so human Kylo almost forgets what she's become. "You wanted me to come with you. Didn't you know what that meant?"

A stem gets caught on Kylo's tongue before she can answer and she chokes, tries to swallow it down. The roots are around her lungs, somewhere so deep she can't even use the Force to dislodge them. It isn't worth trying, anyway: it hasn't worked in years.

The shadows shift around her, lightening into crimson flecked with yellow. Kylo draws a shallow breath, wondering if the lack of air is finally starting to manifest in hallucinations. Because if it's not - if it's -

She doesn't hope. She had only ever hoped for Rey to be happy with her, once, and that time was long since gone. But.

Rey's soft lips close over hers. Rey's sharp teeth scrape over her tongue, bite down on the stem hard enough to snap off the head of the bloodflower threatening to overflow Kylo's mouth. She spits it on the floor, and Kylo hears - imagines she can hear - laughter.

"Oh, it's beautiful! Make me another?"

It doesn't work like that, Kylo thinks, but her lips are bloody, too tired to move over the words. She and Rey have never needed words, anyway.

"It doesn't?" Rey sounds almost disappointed. The weight of her - of the thing that had been her - is heavy in Kylo's lap. She strokes her hair with one gentle hand, and with the other, she draws the abandoned bloodflower to the shadowy outline that serves as a face and presses it stem-first into the space where an eye should be.

Kylo shakes her head. The next bloom is always a surprise; all Rey's voice does is make the time between shorter.

"But I love you," the piece of the Force that wears Rey like a cloak says. "Isn't that enough?"

It hasn't been enough since Snoke's death, and it never will be again.

*

Night comes, or what passes for night in the asteroid field. The time when she's turned so far from the sun that darkness settles thin and filmy over her eyes. Kylo arranges herself on her bed of flowers and tries not to fall to sleep.

She doesn't trust herself to live through a night spent sleeping, anymore. In the early days, the cough had left her alone during her sleep cycles, in the middle, there had been a brief period where she would wake up breathless, leaves and petals spilling from her mouth for a stretch of time before she could lull herself back to sleep with memories of Rey.

Rey in the forest on Takodana, angry, beautiful. Rey in the hut on Ahch-To, shivery with saltwater and asking for something Kylo had never known how to want to give. Rey on the _Supremacy_, wreathed in flames as she wrenched Kylo's mind aside and forced her to order a ceasefire.

_It's for your own good_, she'd said, stroking her cheek with unspeakable tenderness. _This isn't you. You don't want to be like this._

With Snoke in pieces on the floor, beside them, Kylo hadn't though to protest. She was so, so tired, and had so much explaining to do that she didn't want to face, that she was more than happy to lean into Rey's body and be lead to her quarters.

When the cough had started, she hadn't thought much of it. The fights, the stress, the likelihood of poison from any one of her officers - it was a nuisances, nothing more, and the med droids said she was fine.

Only when she started to find the petals - falling down her chest, leftover on her pillow, caught in Rey's hair - did she begin to realise what was actually happening. Only then did she force herself to dream of the night in the throne room - to remember Rey's hands on her cheeks, Rey's lips in the hollow of her throat - and fill in the words Rey had tried to spare her from, had left hanging in the space between them.

_This isn't you._

_But it is me._

*

There was a time Rey had loved her. Kylo knows this to be true, because she remembers a time with Rey that was still a time before this diseased manifestation of the force that pulled flowers from somewhere deep underneath her ribs.

The only other explanation is that Kylo hadn't yet loved Rey, at that point, and she can no more imagine existing without loving Rey than she can imagine existing before breathing.

So: Rey had loved her, Rey had once been a thing that could love.

Kylo traces the rippling root of new growth underneath the skin of her forearm and contemplates that.

Matter could not be created or destroyed, only transformed, for it was one with the Force. It had been one of the very first lessons Uncle Luke had taught their class, as they sat around a fire and watched the wood burn. Kylo had wondered many times if the same held true for feelings, as she watched Rey change.

Kylo tries to swallow, and finds her mouth full of an Orakny bloom. She spits it out and rolls onto her side, wishing this disease was as easy to counteract as Crimson Fever.

Uncle Luke had never known Rey, though, and the longer this goes on the more Kylo begins to think that he was wrong. Rey had left Jakku but the hunger had never left Rey, and as her chest collapsed on itself, as their world narrowed, the Force itself had bowed to her.

Onderon had been the end of the end, the war lost to Kylo's relief. The beginning of the end had been - _before_. Perhaps it's a relief that she doesn't remember.

The blooms behind her shift in a mockery of breeze. Kylo sneezes petals and holds herself very still.

Rey's mask is cold against her back. Rey's bony fingers creep over her hip. Rey's voice says, "I'm here."

Twice in a night. Kylo wonders how many pieces of Alderaan she's consumed to make herself so material. Wonders why now, what kind of pleasure must Rey be getting from destroying the place that had been Kylo's home and shelter for so long.

"You make -" Her breath catches on a vine. "You make this feel like it means something."

"It means everything," Rey says, and after all this time that voice still sounds enough like her that arousal curls tight and cold around the flowers taking root in Kylo's belly. "I miss you. I'm hungry."

Kylo laughs with difficulty. "You're always hungry. Why are you here again?"

"I want you to feel better." Her voice is high, plaintive. If Kylo focuses on it, she doesn't have to think about how Rey's presence stills the flowers, draws the very life from her instead. "I want you to be with me."

We all want something, Kylo thinks. You've eaten worlds and you still want -

It should be terrifying, to be wanted by the Force itself. And it's Rey, no matter what she now is, so it's a comfort instead, for a little while.

The growth has slowed. It's hard for even the disease and its flowers to live so close to the hole in Rey's old chest.

"I want you." Rey's hand creeps up Kylo's stomach, laces its shadowed mockery of fingers through Kylo's own. "I want you." It's too dark for Kylo to tell if the tightness around her throat is Rey's other hand or another blooming bloodflower.

Her breath is so slow, and so shallow. There's a rising pressure at her temples that she's never felt before, and it's so hard to close her eyes.

"Is this how it ends?" She can hardly hear herself, as Rey's fingers crawl inside her mouth. The roots are clawing at her throat, but the bud inside her cheek withers at Rey's touch.

"Yes," Rey says. "Because I love you."

The Force doesn't know how to love. Kylo lets herself pretend to believe, anyway, as her heart and her breath finally surrender to Rey's presence behind her and

Stop.


End file.
